Archive

Theatre Notes will remain here as an archive. The blog is fully searchable using the search box to the right, and there are browsable lists ...

The Last Post

Dear Readers As some of you will already know, I've decided to close down Theatre Notes. It's a decision that's been staring me ...

Review: Pompeii, LA

Warning: here be spoilers From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinfor...

Review: Wild Surmise, I am the Wind

Last week I saw two adventures in theatrical poetry. Malthouse Theatre literally brought poetry into the theatre with Jane Montgomery Griffi...

So, that was a blast

Despite Melbourne's uncertain spring, Ms TN had a most excellent adventure at the 2012 Melbourne Festival, Brett Sheehy's last befor...

Melbourne Festival: Dance Territories

Melbourne Festival Diary #10 After three weeks of full-on performance, Dance Teritories was a refreshing return to the basics: a stage, a pe...

Melbourne Festival: Before Your Very Eyes, The House of Dreaming

Melbourne Festival Diary #9 We're heading towards the end of the festival, which closes on Saturday, and Ms TN is feeling, truth be told...

Melbourne Festival: An Enemy of the People

Melbourne Festival Diary #8 I woke the morning after seeing the Schaubühne Berlin's production of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the Peo...

Melbourne Festival: The Minotaur Trilogy

Festival Diary #7 Chamber Made Opera's innovative series of Living Room Operas - small-scale opera performances commissioned as site-spe...

Melbourne Festival: An Act of Now, Weather, DESH

Melbourne Festival Diary #6 Even off the plan, the strongest aspect of the 2012 Melbourne Festival was always the dance. It's a feeling ...

Melbourne Festival: Holding Note

Melbourne Festival Diary #5 Holding note: Sometimes I find that all that emerges from my fingertips is a sludge of meh. This can particularl...

Melbourne Festival: Orlando

Melbourne Festival Diary #4 Some notes on Orlando White. No colour, every colour; plenty and absence at once. The empty page awaiting inscri...

Melbourne Festival: After Life

Melbourne Festival Diary #3 It may have only opened on Thursday, but the Melbourne Festival is now well into its stride. Aside from the Fors...

Melbourne Festival: Forsythe Dance Company, Force Majeure

Melbourne Festival Diary #2 I Don't Believe in Outer Space, Forsythe Dance Company; Never Did Me Any Harm, Force Majeure.   I used to sa...

Melbourne Festival Diary: A Divagation on Criticism

Festival Diary #1 The Melbourne Festival officially opens tonight, but a couple of pre-opening events have already tempted Ms TN out of her ...

Shout out: 2012 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards

Know someone who's made an outstanding contribution to the Australian performing arts? I thought so. You should be nominating them for t...

Poems for Pussy Riot

As we all know, three members of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot were recently imprisoned after a farcical trial in which they wer...

Review: Top Girls

Okay, okay, I know I swore that I was writing no reviews for a month. But just this one, because it's important. I was completely unprep...

Acknowledging defeat

Dear everybody: as we all know, good intentions are the road to hell. And Ms TN is full of good intentions. I wrote them all out this mornin...

Malthouse 2013

'Tis the season for theatre launches, which gives Ms TN ample opportunity to exploit her genius for SNAFU. Recently my trigger finger ga...

What I'm doing right now

Regular readers will be chortling into their coffee to hear that Ms TN has been yet again ruefully contemplating her total inability to cont...

Patrick White, playwright

A brief talk on the plays of Patrick White, which I delivered yesterday at the Melbourne Writers Festival as part of the event Remembering P...

Hasty pointer: Melbourne Theatre Company 2013

Brett Sheehy's first season as artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company was launched last night. It's fair to say that the...

Melbourne Writers Festival

It's that time of the year again, and I have a busy weekend coming up. If you want to stalk me at the Melbourne Writers Festival, here...

Reviews: On the Misconception of Oedipus, His Girl Friday

There's a certain discomfort and sharpness, a sense of reaching beyond the limitations of merely making "good" theatre, that f...

Quick note: Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

The shortlistings for the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize were announced recently, and are now online at the Wheeler Centre's web...

Review: Helicopter

Briefly, before the week disappears into the irrevocable past. And a suggestion that if you have an idle nine hours, you should spend them a...

Review: Hell House

Some notes I saw Back to Back's Hell House - or, at least, the Hell House part of it - on Friday. I've been thinking about it ever s...

Review: Blood Wedding, Triangle

"Publish? I don't publish my plays... Plays are made to be felt in the theatre. They should last as long as the performance does, t...

Poetry review

My review of folk singer/poet Kate Fagan's collection First Light is now up at Overland Journal.

Queen Lear updates

The debate around Queen Lear has been going on, and on. It's not only in the monster thread under my review, which broke even the record...

Metapraxis

North Melbourne Arts House is making my life very complicated this year. It has always been a venue notable for its curation of contemporary...

Review: Queen Lear

For the first thirty seconds I thought we were in for something special in Queen Lear. Robyn Nevin in the titular role, regally costumed in ...

Review: Briwyant, The McNeil Project

Briwyant On the evidence of Briwyant, Vicki Van Hout is rightly celebrated as one of our up-and-coming choreographers. There are moments of ...

Review: The Golden Dragon, sex.violence.blood.gore, Terrain

The Golden Dragon L-R: Jan Friedl, Ash Flanders, Rodney Afif and Roger Oakley in The Golden Dragon. Photo: Melissa Cowan Roland Schimmelpfen...

Striking out for sanity

Limitations. I haz them. And right now, I have to face the fact that I'm unable to run this blog as I would like. My other activities - ...

Holding note

This week has been unexpectedly busy (in a non-theatrical manner), as the final copy edit for Black Spring arrived, marked "urgent...

Review: National Interest, Keep Everything, Glory Box

First, an apology and an explanation. Your humble blogger is heroically attempting to get out less, but Melbourne, you make it hard. I seem ...

Review: Macbeth

In Macbeth, the ruling metaphor is darkness. Macbeth's "black and deep desires", pricked into life by the prophecies of the wi...

Review: Another Lament, Starchaser, CIRCA

Over the past couple of years, Chamber Made Opera, under the direction of David Young, has been investigating domestic space as a means for ...

Next Wave: Monster Body, Dewey Dell, Justin Shoulder

Over the past few years, I've lost count of the number of columns I've read which lament the Youth of Today. Pundit after pundit has...

Next Wave: Shotgun Wedding, Physical Fractals, Wintering

As you probably know, Ms TN has been trying to get out less. I am writing a novel which I'd like to finish before September, or at least...

Review: On the Production of Monsters

The art of light writing, as playwrights like Oscar Wilde demonstrate, is a serious business. Writing a light play about serious business is...

Review: Next Wave

Part of the problem in responding to the Next Wave Festival 2012 is knowing where to start. After much dithering, I'm going to begin by ...

Philip Salom's poetic heteronyms

A pointer to my latest review on Overland, which looks at Melbourne poet Philip Salom's recent heteronymic collections The Keeper of Fis...

Review: Persona

It may sound banal, but the most important thing, both in film and in the theatre, is the human being - the study of human beings. What you ...

Heads up: Next Wave and Persona

The Next Wave festival - a look at up and coming artists from around Australia, with a significant international component - is now in full ...

Review: The Heretic

Because Richard Bean's play The Heretic is about climate change, it attracted the notice of hardline climate change denier Andrew Bolt i...

Review: The Seizure, 100% Melbourne

Today the Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, is announcing the long-awaited review of the Australia Council. Early reports indicate that on...

My Week, By Alison: and a Recommendation

I'm going to be very bloggish today, gentle reader, and tell you all about my week. As always, I've had a problem with hats. My misf...

Olive as tragic hero: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Below is the text of a talk I gave at the Wheeler Centre last month as part of the series Australian Literature 101. I was asked to discuss ...

Moonlighting: poetry reviews

I may have mentioned that I am now reviewing poetry for Overland Literary Journal's swish new blog. My most recent review, of Ian Hamilt...

Review: The Plague Dances, Boy Girl Wall

From outer-edge indie theatre to main stage is an crucial and delicate transition for any company. One of the best things that has happened ...

Review: The Histrionic

The Malthouse/Sydney Theatre Company production of Thomas Bernhard's 1984 play The Histrionic is, apparently, the first professional pro...

Review: Welcome to Thonnet

For the past couple of weeks, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has crashed over our fair city like a tidal wave, dragging the cro...

Review: Red

A few years ago, I spent some time with the Seagram Rothkos in the Tate Modern collection. Grouped together in a specially designed gallery,...

Briefs: Tina C, The Rake's Progress, Zombatland

Once upon a time, O my best beloved, when the jungle was so primitive that not one animal had an iPhone, Ms Alison did one thing at a time, ...

The Agony of Mike Daisey

A quick pointer to George Hunka's excellent roundup of the scandal unfolding around Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve...

The Wild Duck: Redux

A quick pointer to Jana Perkovic's fascinating critique of The Wild Duck, and the conversation which it's prompting. Warning: long. ...

Review: The Seed

I missed the opening night of The Seed. From other reviews I've read, this was probably a good thing: sometimes it strikes me that press...

Review: Summertime in the Garden of Eden, And the Birds Fell from the Sky, The Wild Duck

Over the past week or so, I have announced in every possible internet way my intention of seeing less theatre and giving some necessary time...

House notices

Ms TN is heading up to Sydney tomorrow to participate in Belvoir St's upcoming Sunday Forum on Reviewing Theatre: In Print and Online. M...

Perth Festival: Raoul

Under the curation of new artistic director Jonathan Holloway, the 2012 Perth Festival generated more energy than a windfarm in a tornado. M...

Perth Festival: Beautiful Burnout, Driving Into Walls

When I emerged from Beautiful Burnout, the National Theatre of Scotland and Frantic Assembly’s examination of the art of boxing, I tweeted e...

Perth Festival: Lucinda Childs

From the moment that Philip Glass's insistent, spiralling score erupts in the auditorium, this revival of Lucinda Child's 1979 work ...

Perth Festival: The 14th Tale

On this mercifully cool Perth day, Ms TN found herself in a fragile state. This is entirely the fault of the "festive" part of ...

Perth Festival: The Winter's Tale

UK Shakespearean company Propeller is an odd beast. Under the artistic direction of Edward Hall, its mission is to refresh Shakespeare using...

Perth Festival: A Magic Flute

Mozart's The Magic Flute often seems to me like a quintessence of opera, equal parts nonsense and delight. It's an absurd fairytale,...

Perth Festival: Oráculos

NB: Serious spoiler warnings. After I left Teatro de los Sentidos's Oráculos last night, I wandered back to my hotel room through the Pe...

Last week in Melbourne

Regular readers will know that Ms TN has spent the past few years vainly attempting to find a balanced life. Every year I vow to see less th...

Quick aside: The Duino Elegies

After an interesting week in Melbourne, about which more soon, Ms TN is off to the Perth Festival tomorrow. It may do me good to be locked i...

The dark art of the slag

In today's Age, critic Cameron Woodhead buys into the recent controversy around Shit on Your Play. For once, a sensible, informed piece ...

From the archives: The Poetic of Theatre

This really is from the archives. I was looking for something else when I stumbled across this piece, which I have no recollection of writin...

Review: Tribes

Ever since the Atreides clan established the dramatic template for dysfunctional relationships, the theatre has been a burning glass in whic...

"Sh*t self-righteous theatre bloggers say"

Update: Jana Perkovic weighs in at Guerilla Semiotics. Well worth the read. Update 2: The Guardian's Noises Off rounds up the brouhaha. ...

Review: The Year of Magical Wanking

The Midsumma Festival occurs at an awkward time of year for Ms TN. Through January, I am usually cowering in a bunker, resolutely ignoring t...

Review: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

One of the paradoxes of art is the uneasy legacy of success. As soon as a work is labelled a "classic", it becomes curiously invis...